Senate panel approves death penalty repeal, altered gun bill

Judicial Proceedings Committee scales back gun licensing provisions

The General Assembly took an important step toward repealing Maryland's death penalty Thursday night when a key committee, for the first time in decades,approved a bill to end capital punishment.

The Senate Judicial Proceedingscommittee voted 6-5 to sendGov. MartinO'Malley's death penalty bill to the Senate floor, with Sen. Robert A. Zirkin, a Baltimore County Democrat, dropping his long-held opposition to repeal of capital punishment and providing the decisive vote.

It was one of two major pieces of the governor's agenda to move to Senate floor. The same panel also began crafting changes to O'Malley's gun-control package that proposed some of the nation's strictest gun laws and the governor declared his top priority for the General Assembly session.

The committee rolled back some of the provisions requiring handgun licenses and barred from gun ownership people involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. It gave the bill initial approval in a 7-4 vote close to midnight.

The bill repealing the death penaltyis expected to go before the full Senate next week. Advocates say they have the votes there and in the House of Delegates to pass it, and they welcomed Thursday's action by a committee that has been seen as an obstacle to their position.

"I'm elated that the committee has come to a place where they recognize it's time to have this vote on the floor," said Jane Henderson, executive director of Citizens Against State Executions. Henderson said the NAACP's push for repeal in Maryland was "instrumental" in changing the dynamic this year.

With Zirkin's vote, she said, repeal advocates count at least 26 Senate votes for the bill — two more than needed. Henderson said she's confident the Senate would muster the 29 votes needed to end a filibuster if one is attempted.

Before casting his vote, Zirkin told the committee he would probably never be comfortable with his decision no matter which way he came down. He said he was torn between his emotional response toward brutal murderers and the "legal and practical" arguments that the death penalty system doesn't work.

"As heinous and awful as these individuals are, I think it's time for our state not to be involved in the apparatus of executions," he said.

NAACP President Ben Jealous and Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger, who debated the death penalty Thursday night before a crowd of about 50 at a forum hosted by The Baltimore Sun, had differing reactions.

Jealous cheered the committee's action and said that if repeal succeeds in Maryland, it could help push a U.S. Supreme Court decision to eliminate it throughout the country.

"This is a state that has repeatedly sought to evolve and be a beacon for the rest of the country," Jealous said.

Shellenberger, a Democrat who told the committee when he testified that the death penalty should be kept for the "worst of the worst," said he was "obviously very disappointed."

"I still have some hope that when it hits the Senate floor that there will be enough opposition and hopefully some constituents will let their senators know how they feel," he said. "There's still always a chance that we may hang on and keep the death penalty."

The Judicial Proceedings vote for repeal was the first for that committee since 1969, when the measure was defeated on the Senate floor, according to the Assembly's library staff. The panel temporarily blocked repeal in 2009, but the measure was brought to the floor in a rarely used parliamentary maneuver. The bill was amended on the floor that year to retain the death penalty but to allow it only in cases where the prosecution could meet one of the highest evidentiary standards in the country.

Opponents of repeal argued that there are cases in which the death penalty is the only appropriate sanction — especially when a convicted killer commits another murder in prison.

"We have murders in our prison system. We have murderers who say they are natural-born killers," Getty said.

Five men, all convicted murderers, remain on death row in Maryland for killings that go back as far as 1983. The state has not executed a prisoner since 2005. The Maryland Court of Appeals imposed a de facto moratorium in 2006 when it threw out the rules under which executions are carried out. Those regulations have not been replaced amid complaints from death penalty supporters that the O'Malley administration has been dragging its feet.